Tech community celebrates MHT 2010 All-Stars

Mass High Tech honored 16 All-Stars in last night’s 15th annual All-Star awards, and the common theme among the short speeches by the honorees was the pressing need to boost innovation and education in the Bay State. As Distinguished Achievement Award honoree Bernard Gordon said, “there really is a dearth of engineering leaders.”

Also receiving a Distinguished Achievement Award was Ray Stata, the co-founder of Analog Devices Inc. and Stata Venture Partners, and, like Gordon, a pioneer in the Massachusetts electronics sector. Stata mirrored Gordon’s concern about the need for a greater focus on science and engineering education, but also wanted it known that, despite the anti-business climate that has swelled following the banking and housing crises, he is still glad he is in the business world.

“I’d like to go on record as saying I am very proud having been a businessman and entrepreneur all of my career,” Stata said. “As I see it, it is a noble profession.”

Gordon, the founder of Analogic Corp. and more recently of NeuroLogica Corp., started his own speech by drawing laughs from the audience as he exhorted the crowd of approximately 300 to emulate his and Stata’s success by doing what they both did: “We both married Greek ladies.”

During the awards ceremony at the Intercontinental Hotel in Boston, the honorees were asked to keep their speeches to 140 characters, and for every character they went over, they would give $1 to the charity Seeding Labs, a Cambridge nonprofit that collects used lab equipment and sends it to researchers in the developing world. Nina Dudnik, CEO of Seeding Labs, was keeping the character count.

When Tim Healy. co-founder and CEO of EnerNOC Inc., was wrapping up his acceptance speech, he said, “At a dollar per word, I asked my team what we could say.” When it was pointed out that it was $1 per character, he hesitated, then continued with a pitch for new employees, saying the company would be hiring between 50 and 100 people in the “next few months,” ending with, “It was well worth a dollar per ... character.”

Honoree Kiki Mills, outgoing president of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, got one of the bigger laughs of the evening, when she started her acceptance speech with, “I run a nonprofit, so (fellow 2010 All-Star) Shawn Broderick is fronting me tonight.” Broderick is the executive director of startup accelerator program TechStars Boston and CEO of the companies play140 and TrustPlus.

The honorees this year were asked to pick the music that would play as they walked up to the stage, and the choices ranged from Ray Stata’s “Maria” from “West Side Story” in recognition of his wife Maria, to SonicBids CEO Panos Panay’s choice of “Uprising” by Muse. But the most fun was Frederic Chereau, who came to the stage dancing to the song “Lady Marmalade” by Labelle. The native Frenchman explained in his speech that his team picked it out, probably because, “it was the only song with French words in it they knew.”